Trump’s “not regime change” in Iran: Name vs. substance

Chris Cutrone

Donald Trump has simultaneously claimed to have achieved a “regime change” in Iran as well as disavowed any intention to do so. It has come out that in the lead-up to the current war in Iran, Trump agreed only to pursue prospects for removing the top leadership and the degradation of the Islamic Republic’s capacity to wage war. Trump wants not a change of regime but of behavior of the existing regime. This is modeled on the replacement of Nicolás Maduro by his Vice President, Delcy Rodriguez, which left the power structure of the Venezuelan state in place. Trump seeks a similar outcome in Cuba. Trump has proudly declared that he can “get along with communists” — pointing to Zohran Mamdani, the “socialist” Mayor of New York. He wants not a change of politics but only of policy from adversaries.

The accidental “regime change” in Iran came not from American but Israeli action: it was Israel not the U.S. that killed the prior political leadership, including those Trump sought to negotiate with — as he complained about at the time. And Israel has continued to do so. At the same time, the Islamic Republic and its power structures remain in place. Trump seeks their “unconditional surrender” to his terms rather than their destruction. But to achieve this, there must be a credible threat that they could lose it all. For Trump, this was the significance of the January protests in Iran: they represented not a potential revolution but leverage against the existing state. Back then, Trump implored the regime to “take the deal” while also promising to “protect the protesters,” and warning the Islamic state against their repression — which followed on, regardless.

If the protests set the conditions, this was still not the trigger for the eventual military action Trump took. Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner judged that the Iranians were not serious about their negotiations, but only stalling for time — as usual. The Iranians said they would not surrender in negotiations what could not be achieved militarily. Trump has obliged them. Israel presented the opportunity to “decapitate” the regime, as Israel had done with Hamas and Hezbollah leadership, and Trump assented to it, joining a war that was going to result from the decapitation anyway. Trump chose surprise and radical action to reset conditions, and to immediately offer to negotiate mere days into the campaign. When the Iranians refused to do so, Trump decided to continue the planned 4-6 week schedule of attacks to degrade Iran’s military capacities. Trump was recently threatening a second phase, broadening the war to include attacks on Iranian essential infrastructure as a further pressure on the regime to capitulate and negotiate. Whether Trump can achieve his goals this way — what Secretary of War Pete Hegseth calls “negotiating with bombs” — is unclear. But he will try. The current provisional ceasefire has behind it a threat to continue the war.

A note on the war itself, especially as regards Israel’s controversial role: Trump’s U.S. “Epic Fury” war in Iran is not the same as the “Roaring Lion” of Netanyahu’s Israel. Trump is most comfortable when he can serve as the negotiator, positioning himself between Israel and Iran as belligerents. Trump ultimately aims at a stable balance of power in the Middle East, in which neither Iran nor Israel will play the role of a unilateral rogue actor moving forward. Trump was sincere about expanding the Abraham Accords to include not only Saudi Arabia but Iran itself. The goal remains the same as American policy historically, in general: normalized relations between states. The only question is whether a revolution is necessary in Iran to achieve this — and, if so, what kind of revolution?  

I wish to clarify my previous writings on the 2011 Arab Spring and the 2009 Green Movement crisis of the Islamic Republic as well as on the original 1979 Iranian Revolution, on the question of the form and content, the terminology and substance of “democratic revolution.” What makes the 1979 Revolution in Iran so painful is that it was a rare occasion in which there was more than a mere regime change, but a thorough-going popular smashing and reconstitution of the state. While of course some Shah elements of the Iranian state continued, mostly it was purged, and the composition of the state in the Marxist sense — the “special bodies of armed men” — was changed. As with all revolutions after 1848, however, the question is the democratic outcome or absence of this as a result.

The “Left” in Iran rightly considered the Revolution to have been hijacked by Khomeini’s Islamists, that they had been tricked by Khomeini, whom they had wanted to use as a mere symbolic figurehead for the revolution, but who took control as Supreme Leader in more than just name. This did not happen all at once, but over a process, first in the early moments of the Revolution, then as a function of the war with Iraq, in which the new power-structures of the Islamic Republic were consolidated. The initial liberal political leader, Bazargan, was sidelined and driven out of power early on. But even the subsequent Bani Sadr government chosen by Khomeini fell quickly as an obstacle to Khomeini’s ultimate aims. So it was not a matter of a change in political leadership masking the continuity of the state and its bases of power. There was even a significant social content to the revolution, as much of the prior Iranian ruling class under the Shah fled with him and his officials into exile.

The new Islamic Republic state established in the Iranian Revolution and consolidated and strengthened through the Iran-Iraq War of the 1980s, however, soon exhibited reform impulses in the 1990s, following Khomeini’s death in 1989. By the time of the 2009 Green Movement election crisis 20 years later, it was clear that the state itself was in crisis and that mere reform was not only inadequate but impossible to achieve the necessary changes. The Iranian state has subsisted on an increasingly narrow basis since then, with periodic protests — and their repression — growing in scale and intensity, up to those of earlier this year. There has been a steady stream of middle-class emigration from Iran. Even many members of ruling class families have ended up living abroad. As with other countries, Iran exports its discontents. This hollowing-out of the state portends ominous results.

Still, Trump is cautious and conservative about seeking substantial political change in Iran, which he thinks is unnecessary to achieve his goals — the same goals as those of successive American Administrations, namely, to normalize Iranian behavior and relations, ceasing to be a “rogue state.” As usual, Trump paints a rosy picture of possibilities for Iran, if only its political leaders would choose a different course of action — a different policy. In many respects, this is realistic, as Trump seeks a regional power-balance that can contain conflicts, preventing instability and war from breaking out. There is no reason, in Trump’s mind, why Iran, the Arab states, Turkey and even Israel cannot coexist peacefully in a regional settlement of the Middle Eastern countries, putting an end to decades of dysfunction and failure. Is he wrong?

The “Left” gives specious explanations for why things have been as they are. In so doing, it is worse than the capitalist politicians, who seek action to ameliorate problems and improve conditions in ways barred to the “Left.” The “Left” is sunk in delusions where the capitalist policymakers are acting in reality.

So, what are the possibilities for more substantial change, if any? This is unclear. The long history of the past 40 years has seen the complete destruction of even the ostensible “Left” in the Middle East — with perhaps the partial exception of certain Kurdish political organizations and marginal hangers-on among Palestinians. The most powerful agents of change have come from the avowed Right, for many decades, now. The Islamic Republic political leadership is one of them — but even it is quite old and degenerate at this point.

Since 2009, the Islamic Republic has degenerated such that it has come to resemble its neighbors and other similar countries of the developing world, and increasingly lost whatever specificity it had as a result of the 1979 Revolution. It has become a corrupt kleptocracy in which its ideological legitimation has been undermined, more like Saddam Hussein’s Baathists in Iraq, and the governments of Libya’s Muammar Gaddafi, Egypt’s Nasserite nationalist Mubarak, Syria’s Assad, etc. Degenerate nationalism was replaced by Islamism, which has itself now degenerated in its turn. Its heroic days are long past. Additionally, the youthful population of Iran today mostly was brought up after the Revolution and therefore have no particular allegiance to the status quo that would flow from having participated in bringing it about. They don’t have any particular investments in the political status quo.

The idea that the Islamic Republic will reinvent itself now as an Iranian nationalist state, after the assassination of Ali Khamenei and his inner circle, without a crisis in its power structure depends on the long history of frustrated democratic revolution throughout the world. No doubt, any democratic revolution will depend on existing state elements, even more so than in the case of the overthrow of the Shah. It seems that the transition is impossible without overcoming Islamism as an obstacle.

But there can still be a significant crisis — and change of policy, for instance in diplomatic orientation. The Iranian state has long tried to navigate world politics by avoiding succumbing to subordination to any other states. This has seemed tenuous at times, and there have been crises and humiliating episodes, but Iranian political independence has been preserved successfully for over a hundred years. Today, however, it is part of the Russian and Chinese spheres of influence, and dependent on them for survival. Trump wants them to be replaced by the U.S. instead, to become an American client, like Israel, Egypt, Turkey and the Gulf and other Arab States.

The problem is that it is precisely the radical character of the Islamic Revolution — its actual democratic (meaning, popular) character — which now threatens a deeper crisis for the Iranian state: a brittleness that goes beyond even that of the Shah’s state in 1979. It could be that the hitherto strength of the state will become a liability due to lack of flexibility.

And the global dynamics Iran faces are even greater today than in the past. The Islamic Republic might hope to balance the Russians or Chinese against the Americans, and to exploit differences among Middle Eastern states, but it is also the case that Iran, like many other countries, is actually weaker and more fragile today than in the past. The developing world was hard-hit by both the post-2008 Great Recession and the COVID crisis, which, as elsewhere, exposed deep societal deficits. That there is no movement and thus credible alternative to the existing state will not guarantee the survival of the latter but only the violence of its fall.

Trump is offering not to deliver the coup de grace but rather to rescue the Iranian state from its crisis, saving it from the fate of a further downward spiral into paranoid isolation that was perhaps always the true character and intention of the Islamic Revolution from the beginning. There are two aspects of Iran: the capitalist state; and its Islamist ideology. — Trump doesn’t think that either needs a radical change, but only a change of orientation and behavior. This is not impossible. The only question is how to achieve it.

The religious-messianic utopian fantasy of a Shia Islamic state transcending the strife of world politics in capitalism was never a viable proposition long-term. At best it served as an ideological framework that facilitated the reconstitution of the Iranian state after the demise of the Shah, for instance by integrating a rapidly urbanizing society under modern conditions better than the Shah’s state was able to do. It achieved a further basis in defending Iran against Iraqi attack. But it has long outlived this function and purpose. The only question is how radical a political change will be required to transition from the crisis of this ideology.

There is no reason why Iran cannot replicate the experience and become like Egypt, or Pakistan (itself officially an “Islamic republic”) or Turkey (with its Islamist government and ruling party), none of which is lacking independence or without differences or is otherwise in lockstep with American policy — but even those states have not been without dramatic political controversies and events of crisis in recent decades. But none of them became international pariah states with economic and political sanctions against them like Iran, as a result of their crises.

Iran today faces another. The war with the U.S. is not the cause but the effect. It is a symptom of the Islamic Republic’s terminal illness if not death agony. Iran has been uniquely isolated ever since 1979. Trump’s attempt to mediate and actively manage a transition for Iran might be ill-advised. But the crisis in Iran was and is real, with or without the war. It must be resolved based on changes within Iran. If they are inadequate, it will only be deferred — not avoided. Trump grabbing the opportunity to settle it on his watch — and how he did so — can be disputed, but what cannot be denied is that there was a real crossroads that had been reached.

Perhaps the Islamic Republic will save itself and remain alone, entrenched behind nuclear and conventional weapons like North Korea. But this won’t justify the regime but only condemn it, especially in the eyes of its own people. Perhaps the Islamic Republic’s efforts will lead to a settlement of regional and domestic conflicts in its favor, forced by resisting American intervention. Either way, it will be the end of the Islamic Revolution in substance if not in name. | P

April 9, 2026 | Posted in: Essays | Comments Closed

Chris Cutrone

Chris Cutrone is a college educator, writer, and media artist, committed to critical thinking and artistic practice and the politics of social emancipation. ( . . . )

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Category error: The Good and freedom under capitalism: Reply to Tom Canel’s caveats on Marxism

Chris Cutrone

Platypus Review 185 | April 2026

For the little man . . . not only his own lack of freedom but that of others as well spells his doom. His interest lies in the Marxist clarification of the concept of freedom.
— Max Horkheimer, “The Little Man and the Philosophy of Freedom,” in Dämmerung (1926–31)[1]

Men as a species completed their development thousands of years ago; but mankind as a species is just beginning his. In technology, a physis is being organized through which mankind’s contact with the cosmos takes a new and different form from that which it had in nations and families.
— Walter Benjamin, “To the Planetarium,” in One-Way Street (1928)[2]

TOM CANEL’S ESSAY on my debate with Benjamin Studebaker, between pursuit of freedom and the Good, tries to address my writing as a logical problem.[3] But it begins with a misapprehension: not I but Studebaker introduced the category of the “body” into our dispute about Platonism and Marxism. Not my argument but his hinges on the natural body as a phenomenon. For me it is a historical form of appearance in society; for him it is an emanation of the Good — falling away from it.

This raises the issue of how a natural biological species, which seemingly hasn’t changed fundamentally physically in many thousands of years, could nonetheless have its social relations change, profoundly. What are social relations? They are not merely relations between persons, but also relations to and with Nature (physical and historical) and to and with oneself. They thus form a cosmos — a cosmology.

Kant introduced a critique of the hitherto mechanical view of the universe, on the basis of Rousseau’s observation that the interaction of things changes the things. He sought to go beyond Newtonian physics to a more organic perspective that could grasp qualitative transformations in a process of change. This dialectical view of subject and object, as well as of practice and theory, was motivated by recognition of radical historical change expressed by political, economic, technical and scientific, as well as philosophical revolutions in the modern, bourgeois epoch, overthrowing entirely a prior form of society. Kant’s revolutionary philosophy has been profoundly influential, affecting critical reflection and self-consciousness in diverse ways in all domains. Kant overcame the antinomies of idealism vs. realism (AKA materialism), empiricism vs. rationalism, etc., but this has not prevented the recrudescence of such Ancient philosophical concerns in the subsequent capitalist era. I regard the return to pre-Kantian philosophy to be a symptom of the abandonment of this revolutionary perspective.

Marxism historically critiqued such regression in philosophy as expressing the decadence of bourgeois society. Theodor Adorno, for example, addressed the wide disparity between so-called “Analytic vs. Continental Philosophy” as posing the question of philosophy itself; also noting that philosophers such as Schopenhauer, Kierkegaard, and Nietzsche seemed to be offering not alternative but anti-philosophies, as did Marxism; and the sciences had taken leave of philosophy altogether in the 20th century, by contrast with the bourgeois Enlightenment, and in ways not yet true in the 19th century, when science and philosophy could still yet cross-fertilize productively.

Tom Canel asks:

Would an established emancipatory communism leave any moral / historical tasks unfulfilled? If not, there might not be a need for any communist virtues. Arguably, once human species being is no longer alienated from itself, the world historical task that the conjuncture would task us with would be to continue to perfect our species being by constantly extending human potential.[4]

But this is the wrong question. No doubt there will be tasks and possibilities beyond that of overcoming capitalism, which is how Marxism originally defined socialism/communism. New problems will arise. Capitalism was regarded as the self-contradiction, crisis, and destruction of historically achieved virtues of bourgeois society, pointing paradoxically to their fulfillment and transcendence beyond capitalism. Leon Trotsky, whose work Canel invokes, warned about illusions of negating bourgeois society and its values, for instance in the realm of culture and art (see Literature and Revolution and other writings, in which he rejected the very possibility of “proletarian” culture and art); but Vladimir Lenin, following Marx and Engels, also warned against prematurely disregarding bourgeois forms of politics and economics, including those developed self-contradictorily under capitalism, the horizon of “bourgeois right” which any attempted rule by the working class — the dictatorship of the proletariat — would still need to observe and respect, in practice as well as theory, at least in the transition from capitalism to socialism that working-class political revolution could only initiate and not complete instantly.

Would “human species-being” ever achieve an unalienated state? Will disalienation ever be complete? We cannot know this for certain. All we can know, according to Marxism, is the possibility and necessity of overcoming the present form of alienation, namely capitalism, and accept and pursue that task of socialism. Marx’s observation about human species-being was that it seemed radically historically transformable in ways not seen in other natural species. Our capacity for self-alienation was responsible for this potential — for freedom. Marx followed Rousseau in acknowledging alienation as our inevitable condition. To overcome one form of alienation is to produce another.

Humanity has developed capacities that transcend our physical biological nature, producing technical possibilities incommensurate with our sense-data perceptions and physical experience. Technology offers possibilities beyond the human body. The problem is that capitalism, based on the bourgeois social relations of human labor, keeps technology shackled to measures of commensurability with biological human life. This problem yields opposed desires and fears: anarcho-primitivism vs. techno-utopianism. Socialism beyond capitalism will realize both and neither of these projections. Both human nature and technology will be free to realize potentials not tied down to the other. As Walter Benjamin recognized, the body is itself a technology; and technology is an extension and prosthesis of the body. To master them is to allow them to more freely relate to each other than is possible under capitalism. What we want is that “the tool not dominate the man,” not to choose either the tool or the man. We want a “relation between men” to no longer appear as a “relation between things” (Marx), but this doesn’t mean rejecting the things.

Marx recognized alienation in all domains of social relations: alienation between people; alienation from Nature; and alienation from ourselves. But he also recognized further alienation: the alienation of the social relations from themselves; the alienation of labor as a social relation from its product; and technology itself as an alienated social relation. Capital as alienated labor transcends and not only negates labor. Disalienation doesn’t mean trying to achieve an unalienated state: alienation is our species-being. What changes is the form of the self-alienation of humanity. Today it is capital — capitalism. Reappropriating it will mean overcoming one form of alienation, not alienation per se.

But our task is to overcome this form of alienation, since it is manifestly self-contradictory and self-destructive: capital contradicts not merely humanity but itself; capital destroys not only humanity but itself. If capital merely destroyed humanity, it would not distinguish itself from all forms of culture and society, which have all demanded human sacrifice: the sacrifice of the human body and its good. All culture and society has been “inhuman”; that has never been enough to demand its change: only internal contradiction drives change. Naïve humanism is an insufficient basis for transformation: capital must be realized in order to be abolished. Anti-capitalism is mere sentimentality to which everyone can agree.

From the standpoint of bourgeois society in the present, as well as from any historical standpoint, the potential for freedom expressed by capitalism must challenge fundamentally any notions we can have of morality and ethics. It is truly “beyond good and evil” (Nietzsche); and the freedom expressed by our reason, as developed by society, works for both good and ill, to our benefit and detriment (Rousseau): “man is born free but is everywhere in chains.” These are chains of our own making: so is any good that can be made on the basis of our natural potential — and of our historical enthrallment. More confusing still, the unfulfilled potential for freedom in capitalism is inseparable from its manifest harmful effects. Hence, Marxism regarded capitalism and its history as the basis for not merely unfreedom but freedom. To overcome our unfreedom we must master the freedom that it makes both necessary and possible.

The mastery of nature (so the imperialists teach) is the purpose of all technology. But who would trust a cane wielder who proclaimed the mastery of children by adults to be the purpose of education? Is not education, above all, the indispensable ordering of the relationship between generations and therefore mastery (if we are to use this term) of that relationship and not of children? And likewise technology is the mastery of not nature but of the relation between nature and man.[5]

However capitalism, especially at this late stage, might make us doubt the potential for such mastery, we should not pessimistically accept the apparent limitations of our bodies, as they appear under capitalism, as a conditional qualification for deference in our pursuit of socialism. To accept Nature in the forms of appearance — the Good — as presented under capitalism means accepting capitalism. | P

[1] Max Horkheimer, “The Little Man and the Philosophy of Freedom,” in Dawn & Decline: Notes 1926–1931 and 1950–1969, trans. Michael Shaw (New York: The Seabury Press, 1978), 52.

[2] Walter Benjamin, “To the Planetarium,” in One-Way Street, in Selected Writings: Volume 1, 1913–1926, eds. Marcus Bullock and Michael W. Jennings, trans. Edmund Jephcott, et al. (Cambridge: The Belknap Press, 2004), 487.

[3] Tom Canel, “Species being, the good, and Leon Trotsky: A response to the Chris Cutrone / Benjamin Studebaker exchange regarding ideology critique,” Platypus Review 183 (February 2026), <https://platypus1917.org/2026/02/01/species-being-the-good-and-leon-trotsky/>.

[4] Ibid.

[5] Benjamin, “To the Planetarium,” 487.

| Posted in: Essays | Comments Closed

Anti-imperialism and the “Left” today

Chris Cutrone

Presented at a panel discussion hosted by the Platypus Affiliated Society at the University of California Santa Cruz, with fellow speakers, Keith McHenry (Food Not Bombs) and Alex Dillard (ACP), March 12, 2026.

Platypus’s first public forum event was a panel discussion on imperialism, held in early 2007 at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where my students had initiated the reading group that became Platypus in the context of the Iraq anti-war movement. We asked the questions, “What is imperialism?” and, “Why should we be against it?” It was the first of Platypus’s panels discussing the historical death of the Marxist socialist Left and its potential rebirth.

I spoke on this public forum panel, and laid out the ideologically tendentious perspectives of “anti-imperialism” that were a problematic legacy of the 1960s New Left Vietnam anti-war movement, impeding the possibility of the reemergence of a socialist movement and politics.

An obscure fact of the “Marxist Left” of the era is that the Vietnam War took place in the context of the Sino-Soviet split: the conflict between the USSR and Communist China, which President Nixon eventually exploited to withdraw from the war in Southeast Asia. Several years later, China and Vietnam fought a brief war but a violent one with tens of thousands of casualties — for the Chinese, it was to fight against supposed “Soviet imperialism” of which Vietnam was an ally.  Why? Because Vietnam had invaded Kampuchea — Communist Cambodia — and deposed the Khmer Rouge, to stop the “killing fields” there in which millions perished. Kampuchea was a Chinese ally — which at that time meant an ally of the U.S. in their joint opposition to the Soviet Union and its Eastern European Warsaw Pact countries; so the USSR and its allies could plausibly claim that Communist China was acting on behalf of “U.S. imperialism.”

The “Left” of the time claimed that after the Vietnam War and in the context of the 1970s global economic downturn, the U.S. was in decline and inter-imperialist competition was breaking out with Japan and Germany and greater Europe. — Instead, the U.S. led the global restructuring of capitalism into neoliberalism, which eventually brought down Communist Party rule in the East Bloc and the Soviet Union itself — all according to the long-term Nixon and Kissinger plan to open up China to capitalism and set the stage for renewed American hegemony in the 21st century, which it certainly did.

There are two opposed views of “imperialism” operating on the “Left” today. One is concerned with “U.S. imperialism” as the global hegemon enforcing world capitalism; the other is welcoming “multi-polarity” and the rise of “counter-hegemons” such as Russia and above all China — less so, the other BRICS countries, whose time seems to have passed.

There are some deliberate conflations and confusions of these matters, One older way of discussing such things was in terms of the “Global South”: by contrast, the “Global North” once included the Soviet Union and was concerned with “Soviet imperialism,” and had a decided “Third Worldist” orientation. Where does Russia fit into such a schema today: “imperialist” or “Global South”? Is China, as a share of the global economy nearly equal to its share of world population, still a “peripheral,” “developing” or “under-developed” country, or now a “core” country in global capitalism? Is Chinese economic and industrial development abroad, for instance in Africa, “imperialist” expansion or “neo-colonialism”? When Russian troops are stationed in other countries in support of allied regimes, does this turn those countries into Russian “colonies”?

I will cite Frankfurt School Critical Theorist Theodor Adorno, who called anti-Americanism in the Vietnam War era “ideological.” Meaning, a form of misrecognition, something that conceals more than it reveals. This is true today — perhaps even more so than back then. On the American “Left,” anti-Americanism has the quality of inverted nationalism, suggesting that only American actions matter in world events.

This confusion has long historical roots, going back to the era of original historical Marxism at the turn of the 20th century.

The Communist Party of Great Britain’s writer for the Weekly Worker, Mike Macnair has claimed that the fundamental mistake made by Karl Kautsky, Vladimir Lenin, Rosa Luxemburg, and other Marxists of the Second or Socialist International, was that they misapprehended the end of the British Empire’s global capitalist hegemony as the end of capitalism itself. For instance, Lenin called the “imperialist” era of the time the “highest (possible) stage of capitalism.” This was counter-posed to Kautsky’s revisionist prognosis of “ultra-imperialism” as a possible alternative to WWI’s inter-imperialist competition and conflict: the joint cooperative exploitation of the world by the core capitalist countries. Lenin claimed that this fudged the issue and tried to avoid, not the inevitability of international war in imperialism, but rather the political crisis of capitalism that led to fierce political conflicts both within and among nation-states.

But the end of the British global hegemony should have led to proletarian socialist revolution and the transition out of capitalism. It is a tragedy that it wasn’t made into that. Indeed, we are living in the aftermath of that failure. The U.S. shouldn’t have replaced the British as the global hegemon, since it created a crisis of the American republic itself, which we are still dealing with today.

For Lenin, imperialism was a crisis of the politics of the state. There was already liberal and conservative anti-imperialisms manifesting in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, for instance by the American Anti-Imperialist League in the Spanish-American War, which signaled the entrance of the United States as an imperialist power on the stage of world history. The election of 1900 in the war’s wake was defined by the contention between the anti-imperialist and former Populist Democratic Party Presidential candidate William Jennings Bryan, and Republican William McKinley who had prosecuted the war resulting in the U.S. acquisition of Puerto Rico and the Philippines and capitalist penetration of Cuba, running for reelection, with new Vice Presidential candidate Theodore Roosevelt. Bryan lost and McKinley was soon assassinated by an immigrant anarchist in protest of the U.S. occupation of and counterinsurgency against independence fighters in the Philippines, bringing Roosevelt to power.

The Social Democratic Party candidate for President and former Democrat and Populist Eugene Debs distinguished the proletarian socialist approach to the problem of capitalist imperialism from the Republican progressive and Democrat conservative responses, expressing his Marxist understanding of the historical significance of the problem. Debs emphasized that the Anti-Imperialist League’s preferred candidate, William Jennings Bryan and the Democratic Party more generally expressed the conservative reaction against capitalism in the “wail and cry of the dying middle class,” whereas the Republicans, who were the dominant party since the Civil War and, until FDR’s electoral realignment of the capitalist Parties a generation later in 1932, represented capitalist “prosperity galore, give us four years more!” If the Republicans were the “imperialist party” and the Democrats the “anti-imperialists,” then the socialists were neither: they represented “industrial democracy” and overcoming capitalism itself — including of course the “imperialist” forms it took.  

Imperialism was both a political and economic phenomenon, in the Marxist view. It was both an economic and political crisis in a historically advanced stage of capitalism. Hence both “progressive” and conservative capitalist politicians inevitably oriented around it, in an antinomical conflict that expressed the historical contradiction of capitalism itself. What were the symptoms of this crisis? Monopoly and finance capital; and the Bonapartist capitalist state — in the U.S. referred to as the “imperial Presidency.” This is not a form of capitalism, but a form of the crisis of capitalism. Is it still so today?

The crisis of capitalism manifested in the inter-imperialist conflict of the Great Powers leading to WWI was a political conflict, which is what made it an opportunity, a possibility and necessity of proletarian socialist revolution, to turn the imperialist war into a class — civil — war. But it was already a civil war among the capitalists. The Great Powers were part of the British-led global capitalist system. It was not a matter of national capitalist states — capitalism, from a Marxist perspective, was never a national proposition of separate individual countries, but always a world-historical one. It’s one world-historical crisis.

The question for Marxists was how to struggle for proletarian socialism in the context of the breakup of empires, with nationalist uprisings and conflicts. This was a subsidiary problem of the defining issue for Marxism, namely the relation between democratic and socialist revolution, going back to 1848: how was the proletariat to lead the democratic revolution in the era of capitalism so that it led to socialism? How not to be swamped by petit bourgeois democracy and liberal — including national liberal — radicalism and the limits of bourgeois revolution? How to ensure the independent initiative and leadership of the working class in the revolution, rather than subordination to the liberals and other bourgeois radical democrats, progressive or otherwise?

This is only a distant memory in light of today’s realities. It is a stretch, to say the least, to try to apply the political manifestations of Lenin’s time to the politics and supposed “geopolitical” conflicts of our time. Unlike Lenin’s time of the crisis of the British Empire and global hegemony , the political system of Pax Britannica in the emergence of industrial capitalism of the 19th century, this is not the end of the American empire or of U.S. global hegemony, but an opportunity and necessity of its renewal, within a broader revolution of capitalism, as happens every 40 or 50 years, economically and politically.

Trump represents the crisis of neoliberal politics in both the Democratic and Republican Parties — a crisis of electoral appeal, policy agenda and ideological justification after those of neoliberalism have worn off. It is also a crisis of post-neoconservatism and its policies and ideology. But we must ask the reasons for that ideology: the task of the 21st century as a second American Century. For it is not only Americans who might want it or not, but the world that might still need or even want American leadership and a global role for the U.S., both economically and politically. The entire world depends on the U.S. — Interestingly, the U.S. already depends far less on international trade than other countries — even less than China does.

Marxists of Lenin’s time were wary of ideological anti-British-ism as an excuse for politically reactionary and no less capitalist phenomena such as German “Great Power” aspirations. Marxists were not sympathetic to the rising capitalist powers against the ruling one. Today, this is complicated by China’s ideological claim to “Communist” politics. Is China a rising capitalist power against the U.S. or a force for socialism? What if it’s neither? Certainly, Russia is neither. The military conflicts of our time are in the Middle East and Central Asia, for instance not only Iran and Israel but Pakistan, India and China: where should socialists “side,” if at all, in such wars, potential and actual? Where does the U.S. stand in relation to them? How, if at all, should American socialists be oriented to the political problem of “imperialist” capitalism today, looking ahead to the struggle for proletarian socialism? How does imperialism and its conflicts point beyond capitalism, if at all?

The current war in the Middle East is misleading as an indicator of the future: it is more an expression of the unfinished business of the past, putting an end to long-simmering  conflicts without a future: countries such as Saudi Arabia and the Gulf States and Turkey want to move on. So do the people of Iran. Islamist ideology is a thing of the past.

Anti-Americanism is a Cold War relic of an ideology — already old in the 1980s when the Islamic Republic originated. It is weak and lame. It expresses a lack of imagination on the “Left.” But it is not true to original historical Marxism such as Lenin’s. It is an inverted American nationalism, especially among Americans. It is an apologia for non-American capitalism, such as that of the Europeans and Asians, but also Latin American, Middle Eastern and African capitalism.

Socialists today should be faced to the future, warned but not beholden to the historical phenomena and oppositions within capitalism of the past — history serving as a critical and not dogmatic resource for thinking about our possibilities and tasks today. “Imperialism” is a term from a bygone era that reminds us not of eternal realities but of our own failure to rise to the necessities of our time. Workers in the U.S., Asia and China, the Middle East and Europe, Africa and Latin America are jointly exploited and oppressed by capitalism, and so must struggle together to overcome it. Socialists in America should accept the responsibility of the central, leading capitalist country appropriate to this task. | P

Chris Cutrone with Doug Lain on the Iran war

Chris Cutrone discusses with Doug Lain the Iran war. In the second half, they discuss pedagogy vs. punditry, writing vs. podcasting and other issues of public intellectual life. 

Why Marxists loved America (Chase Center at OSU)

Chris Cutrone

Presented at the Salmon P. Chase Center of Ohio State University in Columbus, Ohio, February 11, 2026.

Hegel made an exception to his philosophy of history for America as a “land of the future.” He acknowledged to a friend that his model political regime of constitutional monarchy on the basis of the English Revolution was improved in the American Constitutional Republic as the ideal form of state for bourgeois civil society, with its elected monarchy in the Presidency as counterbalance to democracy, to preserve the freedom of civil society. Marx and Engels regarded the United States as the most bourgeois, democratic and free country of their time. Lenin called the American Revolution a “truly revolutionary war” and wrote in the early 20th century that in America “freedom was most complete.”

For their part, Marxist-informed socialists in the United States such as the Socialist Party leader Eugene Debs claimed both the American Revolution and the Civil War and their political leaders as historical figures, such as Thomas Jefferson and Abraham Lincoln, to their cause and as their rightful legacy, as against the capitalist political parties, the Republicans and Democrats, falsely wearing their mantles. Russian revolutionary Vladimir Lenin greatly esteemed Debs, especially for his denunciation of U.S. imperialism and its involvement in World War I which had landed Debs in jail, and Debs returned the praise, calling himself, during the counterrevolutionary reactionary panic after the Russian Revolution and Woodrow Wilson’s Palmer Raids repression of the Socialist Party, “from head to foot a Bolshevik and proud of it.”

Later, Frankfurt School Critical Theorist Theodor Adorno, who fled the Nazis to the United States, along with his colleagues Max Horkheimer and Herbert Marcuse, wrote endearingly about his experience of American society, and upheld the American Republic’s Constitutional separation of powers and checks and balances as the model for “critique,” the free interplay of theory and practice and subject and object, in maintaining and promoting the freedom of society.

So powerful was the influence of the American Revolution that the Communist Party in the United States named its party night school for workers after Thomas Jefferson. Its leader in the 1930s, Earl Browder, famously stated that “communism is as American as apple pie.”

What was the substance of this evaluation by such prominent Marxists of the United States and the American Revolution and its legacy? Marxism understood capitalism as a phenomenon based on bourgeois society, and regarded the American Revolution as a “bourgeois” revolution. What did this mean?

First, we must step back and examine the Marxist understanding of history and how it had led to capitalism. The basic idea is that the rise of modern “bourgeois” society or “civil society” was a societal transformation on the same order of magnitude as the Neolithic Agricultural Revolution, which in Marxist terms had ushered in “class society” from the original “primitive communism” of Paleolithic hunter-gatherer communities. This was understood as the beginnings of capitalism. The Industrial Revolution was regarded as the crisis of bourgeois society and capitalism, indicated by the class division into capitalists and workers, specifically by the proletarianization of labor, in which workers no longer owned the means of production — the machines and other capital goods owned by the capitalist class. The Industrial Revolution, according to Marxism, led to the possibility and necessity of socialism — modern communism. The Industrial Revolution historically brought about the modern class struggle of the workers against the capitalists that led to socialism.

Capitalism was defined by its contradiction and crisis: the contradiction of bourgeois social relations and industrial forces of production; and the crisis of “socialism or barbarism” — capitalism was understood as the barbarization and decadence of bourgeois society, in which bourgeois principles were observed only in form and not in substance.

It is important to note that for Marxism bourgeois social relations were the social relations of labor, and bourgeois society itself was understood as the emancipation of labor from the traditional social relations of prior civilization, with its caste system, subsistence agriculture and guild-craft control of artisan production.

The bourgeois revolution was the emancipation of the rights of labor against its traditional restrictions in the previous state — the ancien régime and its official religious sanctification. In this respect, it was the rights of private production and appropriation in civil society, which was the right of individuals to pursue their own chosen labor, offering its products on the free market. But this was a social form of labor: the social relations of free exchange, trade and commerce as the form of social cooperation and community; the freely associated laborers. Trade in traditional civilization was restricted politically by the caste order, and was primarily in luxury or specialized goods for the ruling castes, and not the subsistence needs for the vast majority of people. The rise of bourgeois society was the transformation of immediate local subsistence production into production for trade and commerce. One produces not for one’s own subsistence or those of one’s immediate local community, but for trade to acquire subsistence goods for one’s own consumption from more distant others: the dependence of the majority on the commerce in subsistence goods. The exchange of traditional civilization governed by custom was replaced by trade according to worth freely negotiated according to the value of labor in the market.

This is why the modern society of production for trade and commerce is called “bourgeois,” meaning “urban” in French, by contrast with traditional civilization of the countryside where production was for subsistence in local agriculture — 95% of the population were peasants; today, by contrast the vast majority of society’s members are workers: wage-laborers. Indeed, as Hannah Arendt put it, today even a king is someone employed in a job, not by Divine status but performance evaluation of function: the 17th century English Revolution reduced the Sovereign to the highest paid employee serving ceremonially to perform the dignity of the state.

Capitalism, arising as such in the 19th century, was the contradiction and crisis of bourgeois society in the Industrial Revolution, in which a dynamic of replacing labor by automation introduced the business cycle of boom and bust, which was not merely a commercial crisis of supply and demand in market adjustments, but a crisis of value of wage-labor in the social system of production, indicating its potential obsolescence.

The First Industrial Revolution is conventionally dated from ~1750 to ~1850 and was centered first in Britain and then, after the French Revolution, in France and the Benelux countries — Belgium, the Netherlands and Luxemburg — and those parts of Europe, such as the western part of Germany in the Rhineland, most affected by the French Revolution. (Marx and Engels hailed from this region, Engels from a factory-owning family.) This was where machine automation first took hold and the proletarianization of labor first took place.

The French Revolution was closely associated with the American Revolution, which itself was a further development of the English Revolution of the preceding century. The French Enlightenment and the revolutionaries it inspired were noted Anglophiles, and it was not mere coincidence that the storming of the Bastille took place in the centenary year of the seating of the constitutional monarch in the English Glorious Revolution, 1689, as politically theorized by John Locke. Marx said that of the two traditions of materialism, those of Descartes and Locke, it was Locke’s that led to socialism. Thomas Jefferson participated in both the American and French Revolutions, co-writing the American Declaration of Independence as well as the French Declaration of the Rights of Human Being and Citizen, co-written by Lafayette who himself had led the French forces in the American Revolutionary War. The later leading French Utopian Socialist Saint-Simon served as a soldier in the Revolutionary War under Lafayette, and wrote of the indelible experience of freedom he had in America. The American Revolution is best understood as the continuation and radicalization of the English Revolution, as expressed by Benjamin Franklin and Jefferson’s revising of Locke’s inalienable rights of “life, liberty and property” to the “pursuit of happiness,” of which property was the mere means and not a right as an end in itself. This prepared the United States for the social freedom that made it Hegel’s “land of the future,” to be realized in the 19th century, contemporaneous with the rise of Marxism.

British Utopian Socialist Robert Owen presented his model community ideas to the U.S. Congress, meeting with Founding Fathers and former Presidents John Adams and Thomas Jefferson, and also James Madison, as a keenly interested audience. One of the final expressions of Jefferson’s political sentiments was to endorse, in an 1825 letter to Frances Wright, the Utopian Socialist experiments underway as a means for facilitating Emancipation and Abolition as part of the greater cause of labor.

The Second Industrial Revolution is conventionally dated from 1871 to 1914 — from the Franco-Prussian War to WWI. German victory over France led to unification under the Prussian Empire, which allowed for its rapid industrialization. Contemporaneously, the Meiji Restoration in Japan and political centralization under the Emperor, triumphant over the Samurai, and the victory of the Union in the American Civil War and the abolition of slavery, as well as the emancipation of the serfs in the Russian Empire, meant that these countries saw rapid industrialization in this period. The rise of these new industrial powers produced new international conflicts in global capitalism and eventually the World Wars of the 20th century.

Whereas Marx and Engels were individuals in a “party of two” whose ideas about capitalism and socialism were relatively limited in their influence, in the era of the Second Industrial Revolution there was the emergence of Marxism as a predominant ideology in the modern proletarian socialist movement of the working class. The new socialist parties most influenced by Marxism in the era prior to WWI were those in Germany, the United States, Russia, Italy and Japan: the countries of the Second as opposed to the First Industrial Revolution. Unlike the others, the United States was a liberal democratic constitutional republic. It was also quickly emerging as by far the largest and most dynamic and technically innovative capitalist economy in the world. The Marxists of the Second International such as Lenin and Eugene Debs understood that the future of socialism at a world scale would be ultimately decided in America.

Furthermore, in this period, the working class was greatly internationalized, with many workers migrating for work around the world, often not permanently settling but returning to their home countries after earning their fortunes. It was a smaller world at that time of original historical Marxism than we tend to appreciate. Many workers from around the world had experience living and working in the United States in this period, and they were influenced profoundly by its social freedom — much as Marx and Engels had been influenced by the freedom they experienced as exiles in France and England. Interestingly, Marx seriously considered permanently relocating to America, to which many radical political refugees from Europe had emigrated in the 19th century, such as the “Red ’48-ers” who had fled from the failed 1848 Revolution in Germany and Central Europe — “Bohemians.” These German émigrés, with whom Marx was associated, participated in the Abolitionist Movement and the new Republican Party in the United States, whose leading newspaper, the New York Tribune, Marx regularly wrote for in the 1850s, and the Red ’48-ers served as officers in the Union Army during the Civil War and figured as Radical Republicans during Reconstruction. Later, in the period before the Russian Revolution, many leading and rank-and-file Bolsheviks lived and worked and organized as socialists in the United States. They took that American experience back with them in leading the Revolution in Russia. Many American socialists inspired by the Russian Revolution had first met the Bolsheviks in America.

As elsewhere, the contradiction between bourgeois society and its values of the rights and freedom of labor with new industrial capitalism was clearly manifest. This introduced a complex dynamic in which the struggle for socialism of the industrial proletariat was connected with upholding the older revolutionary tradition of the American and French Revolutions and the bourgeois rights enshrined therein. Just as French socialism emerged from the revolutionary tradition there, so did socialism in the United States, through both the American Revolution and the Civil War.

In Germany, the preeminent country of the Marxist-led socialist movement at the turn of the 20th century, the working class claimed the legacy of German Idealist philosophy of Kant and Hegel, which was itself inspired by the English, American and French Revolutions, as against the capitalists: the working class claimed the intellectual and cultural heritage of the bourgeois revolution that had decayed — become “decadent” — under capitalism. This was also true in England, France and America. In this way, the struggle for proletarian socialism took up the mantle of the earlier bourgeois revolution and emancipation that had been betrayed in capitalism.

So, it is not a simple matter of proletarian socialism succeeding the bourgeois revolution in terms of leaving it behind, but of actively recovering it, struggling within the revolutionary tradition from its contradiction in capitalism. Propagandistically, this was posed as the succession of the bourgeoisie by the proletariat as the historically revolutionary — and “universal” — class. What did this express?

The universality of the bourgeois revolution suffered some severe setbacks outside the United States in the 19th and 20th centuries, as well as at home with the reinvigoration of slavery as a function of the Industrial Revolution, preventing it from dying out naturally as the Founding Fathers expected. Whereas there has been one continuous American Republic from the Revolution to today — however modified substantially by the Civil War and Reconstruction Amendments — France, for example, is today in its Fifth Republic, interrupted by two monarchies, two empires and a fascist regime; and the U.K. remains a monarchy, albeit constitutional (even though it was a republic during its revolutionary Civil War in the 17th century); and Germany and Japan have been liberal democracies only since WWII. And the U.S. remains the preeminent capitalist country in the world that it became during the Second Industrial Revolution.

The modern bourgeois republic differs from the ancient republic in its respect for civil liberties and rights — the rights of civil society against the state, not observed by Ancient democracy.

The Marxist understanding of the dialectical relation between capitalism and the possibility and task of socialism means that the contradiction of bourgeois social relations and industrial forces of production poses itself most purely in the United States of America, and has done so from early on. It has not been clouded by the question raised by Arno Mayer and others about just how “bourgeois” society and politics were in Europe before recent times, the supposed issue of “feudal holdovers” in Europe, even in France as well as in the U.K. up through the Second World War — before the victorious U.S. imposed the essential criteria of the American republican system of liberal democracy onto Europe and Japan. This was not merely a function of capitalism, since capitalism has been compatible with illiberal and undemocratic political systems. The tension between capitalism and the freedom of American bourgeois society was made global in character in the “American Century” and leadership of the “Free World.” This was the intention of Woodrow Wilson’s League of Nations and realized in the United Nations system of the victorious Allies under American leadership — the Cold War erupting soon between them notwithstanding.

Just as in Marx’s and Lenin’s times, the specter of socialism or communism apparently still haunts the world, as seen in the last Millennial generation’s attempted resuscitation of its tradition. Today, it appears as the ghost of Marxism. The greatest phenomenon of a new socialist movement in recent times has taken place in the United States with the Millennial Left. In it, questions of original historical Marxism — the recovery of Marx and figures such as Lenin — have figured prominently. This was also true in the last major historical upsurge of interest in Marxism, in the 1960s New Left, which back then — as now — was influential and inspirational throughout the world. It was long understood that if Marxism is not relevant in the United States, then it is irrelevant everywhere else.

Late doubts about this speculative proposition of identical fates of the bourgeois revolution — and America as its last standing avatar — with the struggle for socialism to overcome capitalism reflect not enlightenment but its forgetting. Socialist counter-identification with America as the predominant capitalist country expresses doubts about socialism. Marx’s and historical Marxism’s clear perspectives on the foundational character of the American Revolution and central character of the United States historically in the struggle for socialism have become obscured in the present. A reactionary anti-capitalism, both on the ostensible “Left” and avowed Right, has made a casualty of America and its revolutionary history. In its 250th year this is particularly poignant. In the recent era of neoliberalism — the Reagan and Thatcher revolution of neoliberal capitalism — the American “Left” has reached to post-WWII European social democracy as a contrasting counter-model, and capitalism has been hastily identified with Anglo-Americanism. In this, both the counterrevolutionary character of social democracy and the revolutionary character of capitalism itself have been obscured. What was forgotten is that original historical Marxism opposed the welfare state of capitalism, which was seen rightly as — intentionally — undercutting the workers’ own social capacities and struggles by making them dependent wards of capitalist politics. Instead, this counterfeiting of socialism has been accepted falsely as good coin. The Millennial “Left,” for instance the Democratic Socialists of America, has been content to accept what the Right denounces demagogically as “socialism” in the welfare state, and inverting its value positively as their own program. The original meaning of not only Marxism but socialism itself as the promised self-overcoming and transcendence of capitalism has been deranged beyond recognition. — Worse still, “freedom” has become a strangely tabooed concept, both on the “Left” and beyond. Pessimism about America expresses pessimism about socialism. It is pessimism about freedom. Choosing the pessimistic version of capitalism in “progressive” welfarism has meant doubting the possibility of socialism that Marxism originally recognized in capitalism as a self-contradictory form of freedom.

The crossroads of “socialism or barbarism” has cut through the heart of America as the preeminent capitalist country for the last two centuries. It still does. Hence, so does Marxism, indelibly. As we remember the American Revolution and its historical legacy, we are haunted by the remaining task of socialism — to realize the historic promise of freedom as the dialectical truth of capitalism. The truly emancipatory character of the American Revolution lives, however contradictorily, in capitalism, and its fate will be determined in the struggle for socialism. | §